The planned theme for the educational forum at the conference is:

Growing Your Farm's Value

HOW TO BUILD VALUE CHAINS AROUND YOUR OPERATIONS

Forum objectives:

Calling all Outstanding Young farmers to learn what:

• Value adding is and how you can add value to your product.
• Value chains are and what resources may be available to you to develop some
• Resources, such as Farmers Markets, Direct Farm Marketing, Web opportunities and Processing opportunities exist.

• Opportunities there may be around you that you can use to add value to what you produce.

The introduction to the forum, presented by Nico Human, can be downloaded here. It contains background information on value chains (supplied by Investment Agriculture Foundation of BC, who provided funding for all educational components of the conference with the Canadian and British Columbian governments - please see the bottom of this page). The introduction also contains brief biographies of the four presenters on the forum panel:

• Brent Warner, the owner of White Loaf Ridge Canada.

  Brent's presentation can be downloaded here.

• Mary Forstbauer, President of the BC Association of Farmers Markets www.bcfarmersmarket.org and www.forstbauer.com

  Mary's presentation can be downloaded here.

• Tyler Schramm, owner of Pemberton Distillery Inc, a Certified Organic artisan distillery located in the beautiful Pemberton Valley of British Columbia, and the father of Schramm vodka (www.schrammvodka.com).

  Tyler's presentation can be downloaded here.

• Bill Vanderkooi, owner of the Nutriva Group (www.nutrivagroup.com) of nine companies, including the Bakerview EcoDairy (www.ecodairy.com).

  Bill's presentation can be downloaded here.

  The video can be watched here.

A field day that supported the educational objectives and theme with practical examples in the area will be another highlight of the conference. Visits were paid to:

• Island Farms in Victoria - dairy value chain demonstration.

• Fairburn Farm in Cobble Hill where value adding around Fairburn Water Buffalo Dairy was demonstrated.
• Averill Creek Vineyard in the Cowichan Valley where value adding around a vineyard was demonstrated.
•  A local dairy farm in the process of converting to robotic milking.

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Funding for educational components provided by: